Adobe Acrobat Sign Text Tag Guide

Text tags are converted into Acrobat Sign form fields when the document is sent for signature or uploaded. Acrobat Sign text tags can be placed in any document type such as PDF, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and text files (.txt, .rtf).

For example:

Acrobat Sign text tags offer a powerful mechanism for setting up document templates that allow positioning signature and initial fields, collecting data from multiple parties within an agreement, defining validation rules for the collected data, and adding qualifying conditions. Once a document is correctly set up with text tags it can be used as a template when sending documents for signatures ensuring that the data collected for agreements is consistent and valid throughout the organization.

Text Tags Quick Start Guide

Text Tag Examples

All the examples below assume tags are used within document content. When using tags as PDF form field names, omit the opening ‘{{‘ and the closing ‘}}’.

Signature and Initials Fields

Recipient Role Fields

The signer and sender fields are used to specify the recipient roles for an agreement.

Signer Field

The “signer” role specifies the first recipient (signer or approver) who is not the “sender”. The “signer1” role identifies the first recipient in all cases. The recipient identified as “signer1” could be the sender if the sender is signing or approving the agreement first.

Sender Field

The “sender” role can only be used when the “I need to sign First/Last” option is specified during the Send process. The “sender” role always specifies a field assigned to the “sender” regardless of whether he or she signs first or last.

Everyone Field

The Hyperlink field has a special (optional) recipient role: everyone.

When in place, this role demands that all recipients interact with the field before they can complete their action on the agreement.

Clicking on the hyperlink is all that is required.

Prefill Fields

Text Fields

Read-only Fields

Checkboxes

Radio Buttons

Images

Field Validation

Conditional Rules

Calculated Fields

Conversion of Text Tags to Form Fields

Field Length and Formatting

When using text tags in an editable document, Acrobat Sign overlays a rectangle covering the entire span of the text tag (from the beginning "{{" to the ending "}}") and converts the text tag into its corresponding Acrobat Sign form field.

The length of the form field can be increased by adding white space characters at the beginning of the text tag immediately after the "{{" or at the end of the text tag just before the "}}". Decreasing the size of the form field can be achieved by reducing the font size of the text tag to get the appropriate length.

The form field formatting (font size, type, color, etc.) is determined by the format of the first ‘{‘. To ensure correct processing of text tags by Acrobat Sign, tag definitions should be specified in commonly occurring fonts within the document (Helvetica, Times, Arial, Verdana, or Courier). To force a specific field size and/or font style using directives, refer to the Controlling field size with directives section.

Text tag definitions are case-sensitive and must be specified in lowercase text. 

The figure below shows text tags placed within a Microsoft Word Document.

The entire span of the text tag, from the beginning curly brace to the closing curly brace, must fit within a single line. If a text tag spans multiple lines, either in the source document or in the processed PDF, the form field will not be correctly recognized by Acrobat Sign and may cause the underlying text to be visible to the signer when signing the document.

When used within PDF Forms, the curly braces should not be included in the name of the PDF form fields and the size of the field is determined by the size of the PDF form field and formatting of the data entered into the field is determined by the PDF form field properties.

A single document cannot include both PDF form fields and fields defined using text tags.

Interacting with Form Fields During Signing

The above text tags are converted to the following fillable fields during signing experience:

Form Fields in the Signed document

After data is merged into the signed document, the following would appear in the signed PDF:

Long Text Tags

When used in editable documents, text tags containing many directives may become very long, making it difficult to specify small fields on the document. Acrobat Sign provides a simple mechanism allowing you to specify shorter tags in the document.

For example, if you need to have a mandatory phone field assigned to the sender, instead of putting the full

{{*Mobile_es_:signer1:phone}} tag, you may use a shorter tag {{$mob            }} in the appropriate location in the document with whitespace to adjust the size of the field. The complete definition of the text tag

{{#mob=*Mobile_es_:signer1:phone}} can be placed at another location in the document. To learn more about text tag shortening, see Shortening Text Tags.

Text Tags Deep Dive

Text Tag Syntax

An Acrobat Sign text tag is defined as:

Where the components are defined as follows:

• Required—An optional flag that specifies whether the particular field is required and must be filled by the signer during signing. If the flag is not present, the form field is not mandatory and the signer can (but is not required to) fill in a value during signing.
• ReadOnly—An optional flag that indicates that the particular field is a read-only field. Marking a field as read-only ensures that the data in the field cannot be modified by anyone during signing. Data can be merged into read-only fields using the Acrobat Sign APIs or Send in Bulk via CSV before the document is sent for signature.
• Field Name—A unique name to identify this specific field within the document. The field name is used to identify the values that are provided during signing when the data gets exported from the service.

• ES Identifier—A specific text string "_es_" which must be included after the field name in the text tag in order to enable Acrobat Sign specific features. If the Acrobat Sign identifier is not included after the field name, a form field is added to the document without any directives.
• Directive—A list of one or more definitions beginning with a colon (":") that specify the role, the field type, and additional field processing rules defining the type of input allowed in the field. Directives can be defined in any order.
  • Role—The participant this field is associated with (e.g., sender, signer).
  • Field Type—The type of Acrobat Sign form field (e.g., signature, initials, check box or a text field).
  • Rules—Advanced processing rules such as data validation, logic to show/hide fields based on conditions, etc.

Controlling Field Interactions During Signing

Form fields in a document can be assigned to a specific signer during the signature workflow. Acrobat Sign ensures that a signer can only interact with the fields that have been assigned to him/her during signing. Form fields can be assigned to a specific signer by adding a specific directive in the text tag.

Assigning Form Field to Specific Signers

Acrobat Sign supports the following directives for assigning form field to specific signers.

Sender Prefills Data

In some cases, the sender is not required to sign the agreement but is required to enter data before the agreement is sent out for signature. This is accomplished by adding a "prefill" directive to the relevant form fields within the agreement. Acrobat Sign allows the sender to complete those fields before sending the agreement for signature.

Unassigned Fields

Fields that don't contain a role (or have a misspelling in the role directive) are open for anyone in the recipient list to fill. After the field has been filled, it is locked to prevent subsequent signers from changing its value. 

Basic Acrobat Sign Field Types

A variety of field types can be created in a document using specific directives within text tags. Acrobat Sign interprets the tags and converts them to the appropriate form fields during signing. All the field types that can be added to a document through the Acrobat Sign web application can also be specified through text tags.

Signature and Initials Fields

You may position Acrobat Sign signature or initials fields at specific locations within the document by adding a directive to designate the type of the signature field. By default, signature and initials fields are mandatory.

However, some documents require that the signer optionally initial or sign at specific additional locations within the document. Optional signature or initials fields can also be defined within a document using text tags.

Special ACROBAT Sign Fields

Acrobat Sign provides special fields that can be positioned within the document to collect information from the signer such as the signer’s job title or company name. If the information for these fields is already available, Acrobat Sign automatically populates these fields when presenting to the signer during signing.

Special Read-only Fields

In addition, Acrobat Sign also supports collecting the date of signature, the email address, and the name of the signer within the agreement. These fields are automatically populated by Acrobat Sign and cannot be modified by the signer when signing the agreement.

Signature Block

If no signature field is placed in the document for a specific signer, Acrobat Sign automatically places a signature block at the bottom of the document for that particular signer. By default, a signature block includes signature and email address fields. However, if your Account or Group Admin has enabled either the ‘Require signers to provide their job title when e-signing’ or the ‘Require signers to provide their company name when e-signing’ setting or both (in Signature Preferences), then title and/or company fields will be included in the signature block. The graphic below shows a signature block that includes all four fields.

You may position the entire Acrobat Sign signature block in your document using the "signatureblock" directive.

Text Fields

All fields defined within a document that do not contain any additional field type definition directives are treated as fillable text fields within a document.

Defining Required / Optional Fields

For most fields, you may specify if they are required or optional. Acrobat Sign ensures that a signer cannot sign an agreement before all mandatory fields are filled.

By default, all fields are optional with the following exceptions:

• Signature and Initials fields are mandatory by default unless you define these fields using the “optsignature” or “optinitials” text tags. See Signature and Initials Fields for more information on these text tags.
• Title and Company fields are mandatory if your account settings require them to be part of the signature block. See Signature Block for information on the specific account settings.

A mandatory field is marked with an asterisk (*) prefix to its name or by adding the required directive in the text tag.

For example:

Required fields are identified by the red asterisk on the left side of the field.

Editable / Read-Only Fields

By default, all fields that are not read-only are editable. Exceptions include some special signer fields (email, signer name, and signature date) that are read-only by default. See Special Read-only Fields for more information.

Read-only fields are useful when automatically merging data into a document using the Acrobat Sign API or the Send in Bulk data merge function. Read-only fields ensure the signer cannot change the merged data when signing.

Adding an exclamation mark (!) prefix to the field name or using the read-only directive marks it as a read-only field.

For example:

Advanced Document Processing with Text Tags

Additional Field Types

You can create the following types of fields using their unique text tags:

• Checkboxes
• Radio buttons
• Multi-line text fields
• Drop-down lists
• Supporting documents (attachments)
• Hyperlinks
• Participant stamps and transaction IDs

Checkboxes

You can create a checkbox using text tags by placing the checkbox tag in your document or by using the checkbox directive.

Radio Buttons

Text tags can be used to define and position Radio Buttons within a document. Radio buttons must have at least two options (choices) within a radio button group, a group identified by the same field name within the document. Each option (choice) of the radio button must have a different selection value. Radio buttons can be defined by using the following syntax.

Specifying Radio Button Style

Acrobat Sign supports creating radio buttons in different styles. The specified radio button style is displayed in the PDF. However, during signing the radio buttons options are always presented as circles.

(Inline) Image Fields

Image fields are used to capture an image file, like a photo, or a scanned document (eg: drivers license). These images are extractable from the signed document.  The directive :inlineimage requires an additional parameter to be added that defines the height of the field. Field height is predicated on the font size of the tag, and the field height is measured in lines of that font value.

Multi-line Text Fields

Text tags can be used to define text fields that can span multiple lines. These fields can be used within documents to collect multiple lines of data during signing.

Drop-down Lists

Text tags can be used to define and position drop-down lists within a document. Drop-down lists can contain multiple options; the user can choose one of these options when signing the document. A drop-down list definition has two components: a unique set of options from which the recipient can select one choice and optionally a set of values that are returned when exporting the data from the agreement.

Drop-down options must be unique although drop-down values do not need to be unique (i.e., multiple drop- down options can have the same value exported from them). Drop-down values are optional. If no drop-down values are defined, the drop-down options are returned when the data gets exported from the agreement.

When drop-down values are defined, the number of values defined must match the number of options. If the number of options and values specified do not match, this results in an error and the field is not treated as a drop-down list.

When defining a default selection for a drop-down list or defining conditions for another field based on the recipient’s selection of one of the options from the drop-down list, the export values (not the options) must be used. If there are no export values defined, then use the drop-down options.

Additional directives can be added to the drop-down fields definition as needed, for example, by making a drop-down list required, applying conditional logic to drop-down lists, or specifying that the option selected by the recipient should be masked in the PDF.

Supporting Documents (File Attachments)

Acrobat Sign can be used to collect supporting documents from signers during signing. During the signing experience, Acrobat Sign converts the text tag into a field that the signer can select to upload a file. The uploaded document(s) are included as part of the signed document and are converted to PDF and attached at the end of the signed agreement after the signing process. Form fields for collecting files from the signer are defined by using the "attachment" directive.

Defining a file attachment field:

File Attachment field presented during signing:

Hyperlinks

Acrobat Sign can be used to specify hyperlinks in documents. Hyperlinks are clickable during signing and can navigate the recipient to a location within the document or to an external URL. Labels can also be specified for hyperlinks so that the document displays the text label instead of the direct URL.

Commonly, hyperlink fields are used to allow recipients to click through to another page for any reason. When used as an optional link, there is no need to define a recipient role, leaving the field as an active link that any recipient can click.

Hyperlink fields can also be defined as required. When configured as a required field, the recipient role is needed to define which recipient must click the link. 

• The designated recipient may not complete their action until the link is clicked
• The link stays active (but not required) for all other recipients

Additionally, the Hyperlink field has a unique recipient role: Everyone. The everyone role, used in combination with the required flag, ensures that all recipients must click the hyperlink field to complete their action.  

Participant Stamps and Transaction IDs (business and enterprise service levels only)

Participant Stamps and Transaction IDs can be added to the signed PDFs for signers. The specific participant’s stamp appears after that person has signed or approved the document. The participant stamp includes the participant’s name, signing/approval event time, and email. The transaction IDs and stamps appear in the final signed PDF.

Digital Signatures (enterprise service levels only)

Digital Signatures - Acrobat Sign supports up to 10 digital signature fields per recipient. Each field must have a unique name when creating multiple signature fields for one recipient. If a digital signature text tag name is duplicated, Acrobat Sign automatically renames the fields by adding a "-n" appendix, where 'n' is a number starting from 1 and is incremented for each duplicated field name found. e.g., {{digsig1_es_:signer1:digitalsignature}} will become {{digsig1-1_es_:signer1:digitalsignature}} and {{digsig1-2_es_:signer1:digitalsignature}} and so on.

Stamp Signatures

Stamps are a dual purpose field type that can replace a signature field, form organizations that prefer to sign with a company seal, or in support of a traditional signature, like a Hanko stamp. Like Digital Signature fields, only one Stamp field can be defined per recipient. Stamp fields are optional by default, unless flagged as required, or if no other signature fields are placed for the signer.

Stamp fields require that an additional parameter be included in the :stampimage directive that indicates the height of the field. Field height is measured in number of lines, based on the font size of the text tag.

Specifying Default Value

Acrobat Sign supports specifying default value for a field using text tags. The specified default value is shown to the participants during signing.

If the default value contains a single quote or apostrophe, the default value must be enclosed within double quotes. For example: {{location_es_:signer1:default("Signer's Business")}}. If double quotes are required within the default value, the default value must be placed within single quotes.

Specifying Tooltip

Text tags also allow specifying Tooltips for Acrobat Sign form fields. Tooltips can contain up to 4096 characters and are displayed to the recipient during signing.

Controlling field size with directives

The :dimension directive can be used to control the height and width of a field, overriding the input of the opening curly braces. 

This is useful if your documents are being generated through a system that will not allow the modification of the font size.

The form of this directive is :dimension(width=XXnn, height=YYmm)

Where XX and YY are the numerical measurement values, and the increment type is defined by the nn and mm values.

• Numerical values are decimal values that can accept up to five significant figures after the decimal.
• Increment type values available are:
  • pt - points (each point is 1/72 of an inch) - Points are the default value if no othher increment type is provided
  • in - inches
  • cm - centimeter
  • mm - millimeters

Specifying Font Appearance

Text tags can be used to change the font appearance of the field so that it overrides the font appearance used in the text tag for font name, color, and size. To specify font name, use the font name of any font in the existing document or either of the following fonts: Lato, Roboto, Slabo 13px, Source Serif Pro, Source Sans Pro, and Source Code Pro. To specify color, use the RGB hex value or any of the following valid color values: white, lightgray, gray, darkgray, black, red, pink, orange, yellow, green, magenta, cyan, or blue. By default, the font name and size are the font name and size of the first bracket “{“ at the beginning of the text tag.

Specifying Field Alignment

Text tags can be used to align the values entered in the form fields. By default the values in the form fields are left aligned. However, using directives on the text tags, the form fields can be aligned to be center aligned or right aligned.

Specifying Repeat Fields

Text tags can be used to repeat the same fields on each page in the document without having to copy the text tag on each page. For example, this could be particularly useful for signature fields or participant stamps on lengthy documents.

Specifying Data Validation Rules

Acrobat Sign supports a variety of field validation types specified by additional text tag directives. Specified data validation rules are applied when the signer is filling in the data during signing. Acrobat Sign will not allow the recipient to complete the signing process if the data entered does not match the specified validation rule.

For example:

Some field validation types may have additional parameters that narrow down the allowed values in the field.

Supported Field Validation Rules

A single field can only include one directive for validation. If multiple validation rules are specified in a single text tag, only the first validation rule gets applied. All subsequent validation rules are ignored.

Masking Sensitive Data

Acrobat Sign supports masking sensitive data collected during signing by adding a specific directive to the text tag. During signing, the data entered by the signer in such a field is converted into asterisks (*) or to a user-defined masking character as soon as the signer exits the field. The signer-entered data is also not presented to any subsequent signers or included in the completed PDF. The signer-entered data can be exported from Acrobat Sign or through the Acrobat Sign API.

Text tag definition:

During signing:

In the final PDF:

Specifying Conditional Rules for Fields

Acrobat Sign supports applying conditional rules for fields in a document. Conditional rules can be used to define when a particular field within a document is shown to or hidden from the signer during signing.

Conditions applied to a particular field are based on the values of one or more other fields within the document. Conditional rules applied to a particular field can also specify that a particular field be shown or hidden when all the conditions defined for a particular field are satisfied or when any one of the conditions defined for a particular field is satisfied.

A condition is defined in the following way: fieldname operator value where the fieldname is the name of the form field within the document on which the condition is based. The supported operators and valid values for the various supported form fields are shown in the tables below.

Conditional Field Operators

Multiple conditions for a single field can be separated using a comma. For example:

{{notRed_es_:showifall(checkbox=checked,Color!=Red)}} defines a field called "notRed" which is shown to the signer when both the conditions are satisfied.

Conditional Field Value for Supported Text Tag Fields

Conditions can be assigned to any field, including required fields like initials, signatures, and signature blocks. When a condition is defined on a required field it is only treated as required if the condition makes the field visible to the signer during signing. In other words, if a signature field has a condition on it that hides it, it is not visible to the signer and therefore does not require the signer to provide a signature in this particular field. The "required field" count at the bottom of the signing page gets dynamically updated, based on the defined conditions, to accurately reflect the number of fields that the signer is required to fill before completing signing the document.

Every signer must have one signature field that does not have a condition assigned to it. Because of this, if all signature fields for a given signer have a condition, a new signature block is added for that signer at the end of the document.

Specifying Calculation Formulas For Fields

Acrobat Sign supports dynamically populating field values into a document during signing based on other field values/choices made by the customer during signing; these types of fields are known as Calculated Fields.

Calculation formulas can be defined similarly to other fields on the document using text tags or the Acrobat Sign drag-and-drop authoring environment. A calculation formula can reference one or more existing fields in the document and can also be based on another calculated field within the document. Calculations can be applied to numeric fields, date fields and text fields.

In addition to calculating the value of a field in the document, calculated fields can also include formatting information to appropriately style the output of the calculated value in the document. Additional rules such as Conditional Rules, Field Masking, and so forth can also be applied to calculated fields through text tags.

Example: A calculated field can be used to dynamically calculate the total tax owed on an order.

{{Tax_es_:signer1:calc([subtotal] * [taxrate]):format(number, "$,.00")}}

The tax calculation is the based on the total cost of the items ordered by the customer and the tax rate for the state of residency of the signer. The resulting calculated tax value is formatted with a dollar ($) symbol before the value and includes two decimal points in the resulting value. For example, if the subtotal is 1250 and tax rate is 6.25%, the resulting calculated value displayed in the Tax field in the document would be $1,328.13.

For more information about calculated fields and using them in your documents, please refer to the Calculated Fields Reference Guide.

Shortening Text Tags

Text tags provide a very powerful mechanism for defining different types of fields within a document, assigning those fields to specific signers, specifying validation rules on the fields and/or applying conditional rules to those fields. Applying all of this to a single form field can make the field definition very long and can cause the document structure to be changed as a result of the field definition. Furthermore, since each field definition must fit on one line, the use of multiple complex directives can make document layout very difficult. To ensure consistency of the structure of the document, Acrobat Sign supports a mechanism for defining shortened Text Tags within the document. A shortened text tag consists of two parts:

• Reference Tag—A shortened tag definition placed at the appropriate location within the document. The reference tag controls the size and location of the actual form field in the document. A reference tag has the following syntax: {{$shortened_name}}. For example, {{$r}} defines a reference tag where "r" is the short name of the tag. The size of the field can be adjusted using whitespaces either immediately after the last open curly brace or immediately preceding the first closing curly brace.
• Definition Tag—This refers to the complete definition for a specific tag and can be defined anywhere in the document. The size and location of the definition tag do not determine the size and location of the actual form field within the document. A definition tag has the following syntax:

{{#shortened_name=Standard Tag Syntax}}. For example, {{#r=[]ReceiveCommunication_es_:signer1}} defines a complete tag definition for the reference tag named "r". In this example, the tag defines a check box assigned to the recipient identified as signer1.

For example, the figure below show two reference tags placed within a document.

The complete definition of the two reference tags is defined elsewhere in the document as shown in the figure below.

The complete definition for the text tags is very long and without the ability to define shortened tags in the appropriate location within the document it would not have been possible to maintain the structure of the original document.

Removing Pages From Output

By separating form field locations from the definition of the field, it is possible that all the definitions for tags within a document are placed at the end of the document or on a completely separate page within the document. When the document is sent through Acrobat Sign, all the text tags are processed and a white box is placed on top of the text tag definition so the text is no longer visible to the signer. This may result in entirely blank pages within the document after being processed by Acrobat Sign, pages that contain only text tags. To avoid additional unwanted blank pages on the document Acrobat Sign supports a special text tag definition to remove a particular page from the processed output document generated by Acrobat Sign before sending the document for signature.

Advanced Text Tags Examples

Below are a few examples of text tags with description for each tag.

Checkboxes

Radio Buttons

Drop-down List

Field Validation

Shortening Text Tags

Text tag shortening can also be used as functions and not just to replace an entire field.

For example, let’s use the following tag:

{{field1_es_:signer1:showif(fieldA=‘Yes)}}

This above tag could also be shortened using the following:

{{field_es_:$A:$B}}

#A=signer

#B=showif(fieldA=‘Yes’)

Text tag shortening also can behave like methods for calculations. For example, let’s use the following tag:

{{field1_es_:calc(a * b / c)}}

This above tag could also be shortened using the following:

Field1_es_:$1(a,b,c)

#1(option1, option2, option3) = calc([option1] * [option2] / [option3])

Conditional Rules

Calculated Fields

For more information about calculated fields see the Calculated Fields Reference Guide.